504 THE FAR EAST Partly
non-members, she might have ridden off on a show of legal justifica-
tion. By conditionally waiving this desideratum, the Committee
forced Japan to reveal to the World the fact that the real cause of
the breach was Japan's refusal to accept the procedure of conciliation
in regard to the very object in dispute: that is to say, the military
and political fait accompli which Japan had already created in
Manchuria by force.
On the 14th February the Committee of Mneteen not only
addressed the last of its above-mentioned communications to the
Japanese Government, but also adopted the draft of a report designed
for eventual adoption by the Assembly, on the assumption that the
attempt at conciliation had broken down. A report of the kind, in
these circumstances, was required by the terms of Paragraph 4 of
Article 15 of the Covenant; and the Committee of Mneteen had been
instructed by the Assembly, in its resolution of the llth March,
1932,1 to prepare such a report if need be.
The draft report which was now duly prepared by the Committee
consisted of four parts. In Part I of the draft, the Assembly was
invited by its Committee to adopt, as its own, the first eight chapters
of the Lytton Report, as well as the reports from the Consular Com-
mission of Inquiry2 on the hostilities at Shanghai at the beginning
of the year 1932. Part II described the development of the dispute
before the League of Nations, together with the concurrent develop-
ment of events in the Far East—more especially the events not
covered by the documentary material referred to in Part I. Part III
described the chief characteristics of the dispute and the conclusions
which might be drawn by the Assembly from the essential facts.
Finally, Part IV contained certain recommendations which the
Assembly might deem to be just and proper in regard to the dispute.
The contents of Parts I and II of this draft report (which was
eventually adopted by the Assembly on the 24th February, 1933)
need not be recapitulated here, since they record facts which have
been dealt with already-—albeit with far less authority—in previous
volumes of this Survey. Of the eleven numbered conclusions pre-
sented in Part III, lack of space forbids the quotation, here, of more
than the last three, which were to the?" following effect:
9. Without excluding the possibility that, on the night of the 18th-
19th September, 1931, the Japanese officers on the spot may have
believed that they were acting in self-defence, the Assembly cannot
regard as measures of self-defence the military operations carried out
on that night by the Japanese troops at Mukden and other places in
1 See the Survey for 1932, pp. 578-80. 2 See op. cit., pp. 562-3.